Gaming Lounge

[Rosencrantz]

There's also the fact that most indie games tend to be from college students who are trying to get a portfolio going.

Retro graphics or not, the fact that they worked on something means they have a much better shot at getting a job in the industry.

As much as you want to bitch and moan about indie devs churning out the same platformer clones day in and day out, this is *kind of* a necessary thing. I'll redirect you guys back to the Smash Bros Gameboy fangame; the devs followed the generic "retro feel" with poor animation and a general poor grasp of what "retro" actually means, with unpolished game mechanics and a lot of room for improvement, but the fact that they were able to churn out a product despite massive senior projects to work on? The lead dev works at Microsoft now.

Point is, a portfolio piece is still a portfolio piece. If you can churn out a Konjak-level game in ~30 weeks maximum (with the aforementioned ten senior level projects to work on at the same time), then you should never stop making indie games. But, odds are, you're not going to have that much free time to make a masterpiece. Odds are, you're going to have this indie game with retro graphics and platformer gameplay, because that's all you're going to manage in a project-overloaded timeframe. That is perfectly acceptable, since it shows how good you are at working within a constrained timeframe, and this is something game companies want in their employees. Now, turning around and putting these games into the market is a different story, but at least know there are contexts behind the oversaturation of these generic games.

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also
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1429...nture-game
this is a thing now